The Accelerator Conundrum: Navigating Your Path to Startup Success

Alright, let’s cut through the noise and get to the brutal truth of the startup accelerator world. Many entrepreneurs, starry-eyed and naive, leap headfirst into 3-month accelerator programs without truly understanding the long-term implications. It’s time for an incisive commentary, a necessary dissection.

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Financing

Raising money to build a startup is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think. We have developed the following courses catering to entrepreneurs in different stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Heidi Roizen of DFJ (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Heidi Roizen, DFJ was recorded in March 2016. 

Heidi Roizen, Operating Partner at DFJ, discusses her important article, “How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing,” and imparts crucial lessons to entrepreneurs on how to look at terms in a venture financing situation.

Sramana Mitra: We have been living in world of unicorn mania. We have tried to put some perspective on this issue. There are good sides to the unicorn mania. There are bad sides to the unicorn mania. Let’s start with one

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Hernan Kazah of Kaszek Ventures was recorded in November 2016. 

Hernan Kazah, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Kaszek Ventures, is one of the earliest VC firms to start investing in the Latin American market. Hernan is also a Co-founder of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader. This discussion features a comprehensive overview of the trends in the Latin American startup scene.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about your activities since we last interacted. You were still at MercadoLibre but I know you switched to VC for a while. Tell us what have you been up to since then. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jake Seid of Stone Bridge Ventures was recorded in November 2017. 

Jake Seid, Managing Director, Stone Bridge Ventures, talks about trends, AngelList Syndicates, ICOs and more.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Stone Bridge Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What size investments do you like to make?

Jake Seid: This is a vehicle that I formed after my time as President of Ten-X. When I moved to the advisory board, I saw a >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. The following interview with Jon Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners was recorded in November 2017. 

Jon Staenberg, Managing Partner at Staenberg Venture Partners, has been a Seed Investor in over 300 ventures over the last 30 years. Jon draws from his long background and discusses some of what interests him to invest in a startup. He also reflects on the question People or Market: Which takes priority?

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the focus of your investments and let’s introduce you to our audience.

Jon Staenberg: I’m a little disappointed that it took 374 shows to get me on, but I’m glad to be here. I’m kidding, of course! Congratulations to you for doing this. It’s nice to be interviewed. I’m an old dinosaur at this point, having done this for some 30 >>>

8 Investors Discuss Velocity and Financing within the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Almost all investors are looking for startups with velocity, ventures that increasingly solve real pains in repeatable ways. If you can achieve velocity, then investors will chase you, because they know it’s not so easy to find companies that hit their stride velocity-wise. Be mindful that the best way for your startup to get to velocity may be by bootstrapping. Entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit are optional. There are many examples of companies that would have succeeded as bootstrapped companies, but went out of business because they went after financing. To learn about the various levels of velocity investors are looking for in the startups they finance, please read the following interviews with a wide variety of VCs and seed investors.

Mark Achler, Managing Director, MATH Venture Partners, discusses their investment strategy and the industry trends.

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203rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Curtis Feeny, Silicon Valley Data Capital

Curtis Feeny, Managing Director at Silicon Valley Data Capital, talks about his firm’s investment thesis around Big Data and Machine Learning.

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202nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Vivek Ladsariya, SineWave Ventures

Vivek Ladsariya, Partner at SineWave Ventures, talks about the firm’s investment thesis, as well as trends in the industry.

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393rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures

Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures, discusses at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Eric Benhamou was recorded in November 2014. 

Eric Benhamou, Managing Partner of Benhamou Global Ventures, was the CEO of 3Com, a pioneer in the networking space, and the key competitor to Cisco. He also ran Palm, the first Smartphone maker, that 3Com acquired, then spun out, and took it public. He provides an insightful window into the opportunities in the enterprise cloud infrastructure space, and in Cyber Security, and also explains why he is not necessarily looking for Unicorn companies to invest in. This, I might point out, is a highly unusual perspective in today’s VC universe, so you may want to pay attention to his analysis of the market. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jonathan Lewy of Investo (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jonathan Lewy was recorded in November 2017. 

Jonathan Lewy, Managing Partner at Investo, discusses pre-seed investment strategies and the Series A gap.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your seed investing activities. Let’s get to know each other.

Jonathan Lewy: I’m a Managing Partner of Investo. Investo is an early-stage fund that invests mainly in the US and in Latin America. We have made 56 investments. 30% of which in Latin America. We’ve tried investing in other parts of the world but our focus is more US and Latin America. >>>

8 Investors Discuss Seed Financing for B2B and B2C Startups in Podcasts

Different investors define seed for B2B and B2C in terms of metrics in different ways. A lot of funds are categorically stating that they want to see a certain amount of monthly recurring revenue already achieved before they’re willing to invest. That amount could be $40,000 or it could be $80,000, but there are specific metrics that they put forth as guidance for their funds. And these metrics can be different for B2B and B2C startups as well. During my recent 30-minute podcast interviews listed below, I’ve asked investors if they prefer to invest in B2B or B2C startups, and to share the benchmarks and metrics they use.

Dennis Joyce, Investor and Member of Alliance of Angels, talks about the largest Angel group in the Pacific Northwest.

Ben Mathias, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures, India, discusses the trends and dynamics of the Indian startup eco-system, including exits. India needs exits at this point, even if they’re relatively small exits.

Patricia Nakache, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses the firm’s investment thesis and some issues encountered by women in technology.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Gus Tai of Trinity Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Gus Tai was recorded in September 2014. 

Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses their investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot, and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future.

Sramana Mitra: An outrageous e-commerce business that Gus and the firm invested in is a company called Blue Nile way back in 1999.

Gus Tai: Yes, we made the initial investment in 1999. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Nguyen of IT Farm (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Julien Nguyen was recorded in October 2017. 

Julien Nguyen is General Partner at IT Farm, a seed-stage fund focused on Digital Health. We explore trends in the industry, as well as what IT Farm’s sixth fund likes to invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about IT Farm. What is the focus of the firm? How big is your fund? What sized investments do you make?

Julien Nguyen: IT Farm is a seed level VC firm. We started in Tokyo and we have an office in Palo Alto. Most, if not all, of our >>>

393rd Roundtable Recording On April 5, 2018: With Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: April 5 – Please Do NOT Go Into Ultra-crowded Market Segments

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tim Guleri, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. Tim discussed at length his firm’s investment thesis, unique relationships with CIOs, and some of the industry trends he sees.

Seven Technologies
As for the entrepreneur pitches, Rajesh Prabhu from Bangalore, India, pitched Seven Technologies, a bootstrapped services company that wants to get into developing a CRM product. Neither Tim nor I saw the merit of the strategy, considering that CRM is an incredibly crowded space.

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